What Keep Britain Working is
Keep Britain Working is a UK government review led by Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. It was commissioned to tackle one of the country's most pressing economic problems: the number of people leaving work because of ill health. Its central argument is simple. The system has been organised around helping people after they get ill or fall out of work. It should instead be organised around earlier action that keeps people healthy and in work in the first place.
The programme has been developed with more than 250 employers, providers and organisations, and by mid-2026 nearly 200 workplaces had signed up as "Vanguards" to test what works. Most of those are large employers. The practical detail for small firms, which is where this guide comes in, has had far less attention.
Why the government is doing this
The scale of the problem is the reason this review has moved quickly and has cross-department backing. The headline figures the government has put behind it:
| The problem | The number |
|---|---|
| People economically inactive due to ill health | 2.8 million |
| Estimated annual cost to the UK economy | around £212bn (~7% of GDP) |
| Of which, annual cost to employers | around £85bn |
| Workplaces signed up as Vanguards | nearly 200 |
Source: GOV.UK, Department for Work and Pensions, Keep Britain Working review final report (Sir Charlie Mayfield), 2026.
The government's own assessment is that sickness absence is tracked inconsistently and that the success of return-to-work efforts is rarely measured. In other words, the country cannot manage what it cannot see. That is the gap the Workplace Health Intelligence Unit is designed to close.
The Workplace Health Intelligence Unit (WHIU)
The Workplace Health Intelligence Unit is a new body announced in July 2026 that will collect standardised data from employers and providers across the UK. It will track sickness absence, return-to-work outcomes and disability participation, with the stated aim of making workplace health performance visible for the first time, enabling benchmarking, and shifting the focus firmly towards prevention.
For employers, the direction of travel is clear: measuring workforce health is moving from a nice-to-have to an expectation. We cover the Unit in full in a dedicated guide: What is the Workplace Health Intelligence Unit?
The workplace health standard and the health MOT
Two further ideas sit alongside the Unit. The first is a new national accreditation standard, the Healthy Working Standard, for employers who offer a certain level of workplace health provision, set at a level meant to be affordable. It grows out of a five-stage "healthy working lifecycle" (recruitment and onboarding, healthy in work, unwell in work, absence and return to work, and exit or re-employment) and is expected to become a formal standard by around 2029. The second is a proposed staff health check, sometimes called a health MOT: offered when someone starts a job, or after a long absence, modelled on approaches used in countries such as Japan and Finland, and likely piloted with larger employers first.
Both are still being developed rather than finalised. But both point the same way: employers being expected to offer, and evidence, a baseline of workplace health support.
What it means for small employers
If you run a 20, 50 or 150-person company, the temptation is to assume this is aimed at the Tescos and the PwCs. It is not only aimed at them. The whole point of the review is that prevention has to reach the firms where most people actually work, and small firms are precisely where support is thinnest: no occupational health, often no dedicated HR, and no easy way to capture the data the system will increasingly expect.
There is an upside hiding in that. The barrier for small firms has always been cost and complexity. The review itself frames good workplace health as something achievable "without large up-front investment". That is the opening. You do not need an enterprise budget to start measuring how your people are doing and to show you are acting on it.
What to do now
You cannot implement a standard that has not been published yet. But you can get ahead of the direction of travel, and everything the review points to starts from the same two things: measuring how your people are really doing, and being able to evidence that you are acting on it. Three practical moves:
Check whether your wellbeing strategy actually runs
Most employers have policies on a shelf, not a strategy they can show. A quick, honest check tells you where the gap is before anyone asks you to close it.
Start measuring, lightly
A short, regular, non-clinical wellbeing pulse gives you real signal about workload, support and how people are coping, rather than guessing. It is the raw material the standard and the WHIU are built on.
Turn it into evidence you can put in front of a board
A dated record of what you measured and what you did about it is exactly what a standard, an insurer or a tribunal will look for. Build the habit now, while it is cheap.
The fastest way to see where you stand is our free 4-minute Strategy Audit. It scores whether your wellbeing strategy is genuinely running and names your single biggest gap. No call, no card.
A note on measurement: our free wellbeing pulse, the Intelligent Wellbeing Engine, is the on-ramp that feeds a strategy real signal as it rolls out. It is the measurement layer, not a separate thing to buy.